Empire of Two Worlds

Becmath was not long in fulfilling his promise.

In less than a year he was the biggest man in the Basement. Nearly all enterprises were sewn up; that is to say, they paid dues to him in order to stay in operation. There were a few, though, that he left alone. “You always need room to manoeuvre,” he used to say.

I saw what he meant when the cops started to get interested, and sent in one of their patrol sloops. They didn’t usually do that. They had enough trouble keeping law and order in the upper reaches and tended to leave the too-violent Basement to stew in its own juice. As might normally be expected, their intrusion caused trouble and they retreated with a badly damaged vehicle, but without being able to blame it on Bec. Somehow he lured them into a showdown with the Vokleit Gang, one of the independent outfits he had left alone.

In that year, too, I rose quickly in Bec’s organisation and became his lieutenant. Not all of his inner circle appreciated my rapid advancement, but most of them had sense to see that a special relationship was growing between me and Bec, so they accepted it. Only Grale, the Nasty-Face who had wanted to put a bullet in my back at Klamer’s, hated my guts for it.

Already I could see that Becmath’s ambitions were beginning to look beyond the Basement. After the police raid he told me to design and start building the sloop, like the ones the police had but bigger and better. Plainly he thought that at some time in the future he might have to face them on equal terms.

One day I went into his office to find him smoking weed and brooding. “Sit down, Klein,” he said. “There’s something I want to talk over.”

He often used me to sharpen his ideas on. I took a tube from the box on the table and lit up.

“You know,” he said, “it’s not only in the Basement they got gangsters. They got gangsters upstairs too.”

“What, you mean some of those government bosses?”

He waved his hand. “Them too, but that’s not what I meant. There are private interests, private empires just like we got down here. Only they can throw their weight around with no sweat. Because the basis of real power lies upstairs, and they’ve got it.

“You know what I mean, Klein,” he added, staring at me with his steady black eyes. “I mean the tanks.”

“You certainly can’t do much unless you can eat,” I muttered.

“That’s right. Have you ever wondered about something, Klein? Have you ever wondered why nothing ever changes in Klittmann? Why we do everything in the same way we did it generations ago?”

His remark puzzled me. I shrugged. “Why, no. What other way is there?”

“That’s right, what other way.” For some moments he sat gazing at the nerve-calming smoke that plumed up from the end of the tube he was holding. “You know, it was centuries ago, maybe a thousand years ago, that men came from Earth and settled on Killibol. They came at the peak of an age of science and technology. An age of great change.”

“I didn’t know that.” To tell the truth I had difficulty even in comprehending it.

“Few do. But as soon as the cities rose and the gateway from Earth was closed, something happened. Everything petrified, even technology and engineering, and we finished up with what we got today — stasis. There isn’t systematic knowledge any more, only habitual techniques handed down from generation to generation. I’ve got a theory as to why that happened. Firstly, the need for food comes before everything else. The tanks are a stranglehold that stops people from altering anything — especially since they are more or less in the hands of a few and the others are beholden to those few. You can’t think about anything if in thinking about it you endanger your protein supply. Secondly, the fact that Killibol is a dead world causes each city to bunch up in itself and prevents traffic between them. It wasn’t like that on Earth. There was food everywhere and the cities all had intercourse with one another all the time. It must have been real lively. Maybe you need that intercourse between cities to get things moving.”

“How do you know all this, Bec?”

“I’ve read books.” He picked up an ancient, dog-eared volume that was lying on the table. “There’s a guy comes down into the Basement looking for pop. Tone, they call him: Tone the Taker. He’s quite a strange fellow. He knows a place where he gets all these old books and I make him bring them in exchange for pop.”

Slowly Bec got to his feet and put the book away in a cupboard. “Wouldn’t it be a fine thing, Klein, if people could be freed of their slavery to the tanks?”

“That’s impossible.”

“So it is. But maybe the stasis would be broken if the tanks didn’t have bosses — that’s where the real stranglehold lies. Supposing Klittmann was ruled by a rod of iron, by a real strong king or dictator, like they had on Earth thousands of years ago, and the tanks were made available to all. State property, like they were supposed to be when Klittmann was founded? Maybe we could even move in on some of the other cities.”